When it comes to communicating with family and friends, live video has become commonplace, but it has not yet become the norm in business. In order to take advantage of the benefits of live video, companies and brands must find a way to integrate live video into their existing suites.

With rising demand and interest, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to be able to provide live video capabilities to its consumers. This can help create a mutually beneficial relationship between business and customer as service can be provided more conveniently and efficiently.

It’s hard to believe that in this day and age of digital transformation you still have to announce yourself when you ring a contact center. Or even worse, why you have to repeat your account details from one agent to the next. It’s among the most frustrating of customer service experiences, not to mention inefficient and costly for operators.

Innovation in banking has previously focused predominantly on customer convenience. For all of the efficiency and convenience technologies have brought to banking, banks always need to differentiate themselves with superior service. And that’s why many leading financial organizations are now turning their attention toward customer experience. In an age where banking is increasingly done online or through mobile applications, this presents a challenge to many financial service organizations.

Today, it is easier than ever to get involved in real-time communications, using WebRTC. For those considering investing in a mobile strategy, the technology ecosystem has never been more ripe for rapidly integrating WebRTC into your application, or even starting a project afresh. Using existing build tools like Cocoapods to get started quickly with the OpenTok iOS SDK, and the new CallKit framework introduced in iOS 10, now is the best time to jump in and start building.

We have been working on a new standards-based alternative to authenticate with the OpenTok REST endpoints. With the release of the latest OpenTok Server SDKs, we will be transitioning to JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to authenticate OpenTok REST endpoints.

We are excited to announce the release of the OpenTok 2.9 Android and iOS SDKs. We’ve made a number of important changes with this release.

What’s new?

Automatic Reconnect

With this version your client can now automatically reconnect to OpenTok sessions after drops in network connectivity. This feature helps restore connectivity during transitions between network interfaces such as Wi-Fi and LTE, allowing you to expand the duration of the communication and provide a better quality of experience to your customers. You can find sample code showing you how to update your application here.

When you think about the hottest startup or innovation sectors, one may naturally think of artificial intelligence, Cloud computing or robotics. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But one you might be surprised to hear is right up the top of that list is Health, and specifically on demand health.

Despite the fact that filters are used a lot in non-WebRTC video applications like Photo Booth and SnapChat, we haven’t seen many WebRTC applications using these types of filters. This is probably because it hasn’t really been possible… until now.

It has always been possible to apply filters to video streams locally using the OpenTok platform by rendering the video into a Canvas element. The problem with this approach has always been that the person on the other end does not see the filter unless you apply the same filter on both the publisher and subscriber video. This would mean significant CPU load if you are subscribing to multiple participants. It also means that you don’t get to see the filters in the Archives.

In today’s increasingly fragmented digital world, the way fans consume and engage with sports content has fundamentally changed. While teams may still win the hearts of loyal fans, sporting organizations and broadcasters aren’t capturing their attention like they once did.

To win the hearts, minds and eyes of the new generation of sports fans – who are always online, on mobile and on social – broadcasters are leveraging live video to create all new interactive and participatory fan engagement experiences.

As global access to the internet continues to grow we find ourselves in an increasingly connected world. Never in our collective history have so many people had the ability to access so much information about what is going on in the world around them. This has led to an unprecedented rise in engagement with current events, especially amongst the young people whose voracious appetite to rant, debate and ‘be heard’ has fueled the emergence of so many social media platforms.